COMMUNISTS: A Swim in the Adriatic

Albania is the tiniest (pop. 1,500,000), the poorest, and most backward of all Communist satellites in Europe, and the only one that has no common border with another state in the U.S.S.R.’s empire. It is thus the one part of the empire that

Boss Nikita Khrushchev can visit only after getting due permission. Ironically enough, it is that old target of Kremlin abuse, Marshal Tito, who has to give the permission—to fly across the Yugoslav territory that separates Albania from the other satellites. Last week, as Khrushchev’s jet TU-104 streaked toward Tirana with Tito’s consent, the Soviet leader wired: “As I am flying over your territory, I send you warmest congratulations on your [67th] birthday.”

Nikita Khrushchev was thus conspicuously not at his desk on the day his Berlin ultimatum expired. But why else had he flown off to Albania? Rome’s Communist L’Unitá volunteered one explanation: “The West should realize that if Khrushchev is hot, he can take a cooling swim in the Adriatic. The Socialist stronghold, which extends from the Elbe to the Red River of Viet Nam, also reaches from the Bering Strait to the Adriatic.” Khrushchev himself, who did not go swimming, as usual put his presence to use. Barreling through Europe’s wildest and remotest mountain valleys, he saluted the sinewy Albanians as “not large in size but bold in heart,” and toured their few factories and roads (all built by Soviet technicians with Soviet funds). He also brought along his Defense Minister, Marshal Malinovsky, to play straight man for his warnings to the neighboring Greeks and Italians that “shortrange” missiles fired from Albania could wipe out their cities, and so they had better think twice about being used as NATO missile bases.

Khrushchev also praised John Foster Dulles as “a great political figure,” but of course his compliment had a Communist twist to it. Khrushchev’s bare-faced whopper: in his last days, chatting with Mikoyan, Dulles had reversed his policy and accepted Russian domination of Eastern Europe. Dulles was not alive to answer so gross a fairy story,* and Khrushchev added kindly, “To make such a declaration required courage.” The State Department noted tartly that Khrushchev’s menacing insults to Italy and Greece hardly fitted in with his pre-summit stance of trying to ease tensions.

Among Communists who played court to the big boss was Red China’s touring Defense Minister, who turned up in Tirana. Belgrade further reported that “most” Eastern European satellites had asked and received permission to send planes across Yugoslavia with unspecified passengers for Albania. It could hardly be said that the party big wheels had picked a Communist show place to gather in. But then the Khrushchev party’s next stop is Hungary.

* “Either a misunderstanding or a deliberate distortion,” retorted the State Department.